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Topic: Help for a Design Engineering Student (Read 728 times)

I'm a fourth year Design Engineering student within the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. My main project this year is to design a system to spray coat forming and forging samples for an organisation who focus on advancing technologies in forging and forming for the aerospace industry.

I am posting looking for some advice. I have some mechatronic control knowledge from the past years at University, and for this system I am designing I have got to the stage where I will be building a prototype demonstrator. The system will be required to consistently spray coat sample pieces prior to forging and forming processes. My aim is to build a demonstrator for a semi-automated system and I am unsure as to what mechatronic control units and components I will need. I will not specifically need to build a fully working spray coating system, but rather a proof of concept demonstrator, so the actual act of spraying could be substituted with something as simple as a solenoid activating. I do want to demonstrate however the automation in the system, I have been looking into microprocessor units and my thoughts are to buy an Arduino Uno as the brain of the system. If anyone on here could advise me on what over control components (transducers, position sensors, motors, in/out controls) I might need for the system it would be very greatly appreciated.

Well, You don't provide much info on what is sprayed, size of parts, variability of parts shape, space Your device has to fit in, etc. In automotive industry they use robotic arms to do the spraying, as robotic arm can be programmed to deal with wide variety of sprayed object shapes. Laso, it can be reused for other tasks as well. So, same robot can pick the part up from the feed line/stowage and position it appropriately, change the gun, spray the part, change the gun, dry the paint, change the gun, place the part onto output line.

If You provide concept of what You have in mind, people here might be able to help you with further work.

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"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music." - Kristian W

OK, I appreciate this. The system will be used to spray billets, mainly cylindrical with a size ranging from 8x100mm to 20x100mm roughly in batches of components at a time. I have a couple of concepts so far, which I have attached as images here. The most realistic concept would probably be using a conveyor system or also there is the possibility of a dip coating system. Preferably the system would be able to consistently coat the components and also dry them. As I've said as well, I am not required to build a full system, but a demonstrator. A full system would be nice though! There is not currently a limited size which the device must fit into but I would like to keep it below 2000x1000mm

With conveyor system I don't see how all sides of the abject can be covered equally. Dipping is a better option, in my opinion, however with it You cannot fully control coating layer thickness/efficiency (that is one of the reasons why automotive companies are replacing baths with spray robots). If that is not an issue for You, it might actually be the easiest way to go. To keep it simple you can get away without using sensors and simply base whole operation on timing and the fact that all objects are going to be in predefined positions.

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"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music." - Kristian W

Yeah they conveyor system would require an operator to rotate the component 180 degrees horizontally and put it back through the system for a second coat to ensure the component is fully covered. A robotic arm would be an ideal situation but under budget this is unrealistic. As you say, dipping may well be the best solution, although consistency is also preferred as this can directly influence die life for forming presses if there is insufficient coating on the component. Do you think this kind of system could be controlled by the likes of an Arduino?

As you say, dipping may well be the best solution, although consistency is also preferred as this can directly influence die life for forming presses if there is insufficient coating on the component.

It's not that it's going to be inconsistent, it is simply more efficient to use sprayer, plus, it takes less space than full blown bath. I know some Ford plants use dipping baths, and the quality of You paint You get is excellent. With sprayer You have much finer control over the amount of coating sprayed out, on top of that, You can paint and dry simultaneously reducing cycle time.

Another way to do it is to have turntable to turn the object and sliding (up and down) spray-gun to coat it while object is rotated.

Another of my concepts involves a turntable and an up and down spray motion, if I can modify the concept to be able to contend with multiple billets then this may be the solution! I'm thinking a kind of turntable for each component within a turntable (probably not the best way to explain that but I'm sure you'll get what I mean).

I use Pro/Engineer Wildfire 5.0. They are just very quick models, roughly 2 hours each, the rendering on Pro/E 5 is very effective though when you choose the right materials and set up the lights up right